Remember when your tanker could fight? Back before they were fitted with the heavily padded foam gloves, and the stone axe was replaced by a papier-mache copy, but they made sure that just being a tanker was so irritating that mobs would come from hundreds of feet away just to stab at you?

Well... Brutes aren't tankers. The attacks are their PRIMARY, defenses are SECONDARY. You can still slot the armors for taunt, but they don't have Gauntlet making the taunt much more aggressive, and the Taunt power acts the same as it does for Scrappers - hits one or two, not five guaranteed.

Also their attacks start out doing the same damage that the tanker attacks do. But here's the thing. The longer you are in combat, the more time you spend attacking or being attacked, the more FURY you build up, like the Hulk... and it builds up fast. At max Fury you are doing somewhere close to 3x damage, especially if you've slotted damage... it's pretty. I did 35 points of damage with Brawl the other day.

Stalkers are great fun as well - but don't think scrapper. Think blapper without ranged attacks. AND you can be a NINJA! And if you choose the pirate costume options, you can be a NINJA PIRATE. And with careful tinkering, a NINJA PIRATE MONKEY ROBOT.

Masterminds ... a LOT of work, but just amazing. Robots and ninjas and mercs, oh my. Still, there was no justice in nerfing the Controller pet powers to make Masterminds feel like speshul snowflakes.

Dominators and Corrupters ... Kind of like blaster/controllers gone sour, and very fun to play. Dominators have a weird innate - the longer and more stuff you restrain with your holds, the more Domination you build up, until your Domination click-power activates, and then you can click it and have a DOMI-GASM! which means that everything hits MUCH better and things take a LOT more damage from it. It also has a very strange visual effect :)

Corruptors have a very special kind of evil. When they attack an injured foe, that foe takes more damage if they're already at least halfway down. It's pure sadism, similar to Containment but more general purpose.

Dominators, like Brutes, are not as much fun on a team because (with the usual crowd of Mastermind pets attacking everything and grabbing all the aggro) you don't build up your Fury as fast, or your Domination to the point of a domi-gasm, but they certainly work well in a team setting otherwise.

The first five threat-levels are all identical - only one way into the game so far - and it's mildly boring, but still fun after making six or seven villains. Once you hit Port Oakes, there's more content. The game NEEDS more content. But early on, you get to interact with some of the named characters, unlike CoH where you never SEE them except on special events.

Some of the 'villainy' stuff is stupid - especially where you're encouraged to be a villain - because that's just bullshit. Only total psychoes and fake-jobs (think Aleister Crowley) actually call themselves villains. The regular run of super-villains are just people who have specific goals, and ways that they intend to fulfill them. If they call themselves evil, it's generally in a sarcastic, in-your-face sort of way.

And I do NOT like the Vazh at all. Not even a little.

I can't comment on the PVP side of things. I only did a few minutes of it during the Beta, and didn't find it particularly rewarding, though there was a bit of fun doing it with a throwaway character.

So, is it worth getting? It's definitely worth it, since it isn't any more expensive to have CoV and CoH at the same time on the same account. But I'd buy it at a discount, or buy the special collectors edition if you want the fancy in-game items.

Eh, that's what killed me eventually in CoH. I didn't want to go on Hamidon raids and all the missions were the same. I liked being the Tank... The centre of attention that everyone focused on. I was needed because I could take all the hits and nothing could kill me. As we all know that changed -- I could still take damage but I got hurt. I didn't like that...

And... Yeah. I'm having fun in WoW. Sure I'm not hulking giant lug of a tank but I like what I am in there.

Though... I really do miss being a true tank. Now I can only live out those fantasies in my mind and in the adult chat rooms. Bow chika bow bow..

That was made painfully clear when he answered a PM asking why he was so concerned about tanks being so invulnerable with "Why would anyone play anything else?"

DUH, because they want to?This kind of demonstrated why Emmert's vision is so flawed - he doesn't understand his customers, and he's too busy worrying about a bogus, unthemely, and unnecessary 'balance' to actually listen to what they say. Or to ask them what they want.